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Comment by cyberge99 | Hacker News Reader

It will be interesting to see how this affects bot farms that seem to originate from there.

Anti-covid activity already went down right after Russian invasion to Ukraine

This is what I see in my country (Czechia) as well. Right after covid propaganda started to collapse even in mainstream media, we have another distraction. In fact, we have here devastating inflation and prices of food going up like 20-50%. Last month I've got new prices for gas. Bill is 600% higher. But media don't care. It's ticking bomb for poverty.

Beside of this, our gonverment signed new law that is above our constitution and basically give ministry of health unlimited rights to close business, put individuals to quarantine by message and so on. For our safety, of course.

All EU countries have to signs those totalitarian laws: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/cs/policies/coronavirus/pand...

To be fair Covid-related news disappeared almost completely from the media of my country (Romania) once the crisis in Ukraine starting getting real serious.

I'm not sure it's related, in my internet neighborhood covid generally getting way less attention than before the invasion

Could you elaborate? Is this just something you noticed, or are you referring to some publicly available metric?

There were some stats and graphs showing quantity of posts in Twitter related to anti-covid topics and how they changed after February 24th. Russia has extremely large bot-farms where low-skilled people just copy-paste same things from main distribution channels into social networks like Twitter. They had to change narrative due to newly introduced war.

Anecdotal, but quite a few of twitter users I follow, particularly in the OSINT community, have said that they seem to be seeing less “patriotic American right wing” trolls (paraphrasing) in their mentions, etc, since the Russian twitter ban.

Admittedly, you would expect Russia to not block it’s own bot farms, but perhaps if the purpose of the trolls on twitter is primarily disinformation for internal consumption then maybe there is less need of them.

> have said that they seem to be seeing less “patriotic American right wing” trolls (paraphrasing) in their mentions, etc, since the Russian twitter ban

I've heard similar things, and it seems plausible, but I'd really like some solid data.

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